Looking Forward, Looking Back: The Past and Future of The Temp Track

Pen, paper, and coffee…the beginnings of so many posts this past year.

It has been a year. While I did not go into 2018 planning on doing one post a week, that is how it ended up. It just sort of started, kept going, snowballed, and before you knew it I had a pattern established, and I am loathe to break patterns. And looking back, I am really glad I did it. It was part therapy during what was one of the most difficult periods in my life, part exercise in finding a good writing process as I try to integrate my love for the craft of the written word into my life, and part needing an outlet for some of the smaller scale projects that I want to pursue.

However, more than anything else, I just wanted to write more. I have always loved writing, and it is a big reason why I decided to do a PhD and not a DMA all those year ago. When I thought about which I would rather do, practice bassoon for eight hours a day or read and write for 8 hours a day…the decision was easy to make. And now, with (hopefully) my last degree a year behind me, another year of tumult and upheaval over, and job stability ahead, it is time to think about what the future of The Temp Track looks like.

After a year filled with gin reviews, musing on stationery, some rather personal essays that made some people worry about my mental and physical health (and I share those concerns…hence writing as therapy), and other random musing on life, the universe, and everything, what does 2019 look like?

Let’s first look back before we look forward, shall we?

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Because I am an anal retentive, OCD, ass hole at times, here is the complete list of my posts from the past year:

It is kind of remarkable looking at that list and thinking about everything that happened during that time: applying for and then interviewing for jobs. Moving for the second time in less than a year. Starting a new job. To say nothing of various conferences, trips, and numerous other activities. I am honestly surprised that I was able to keep up the pace, though I freely admit that I started doing the gin reviews to give me an “out” to write shorter pieces. For my normal post I feel like 1500 words is the minimum to write for most essay topics, and some were beginning to approach 3000 words!

When I get talking, it is sometimes hard to get me to shut up.

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I realize looking back how much this past year of blogging was me trying to work through so much of a life transition. As I will detail in the LONG delayed hauntology project (more on that in a moment), my time in Virginia and separation from Colorado, was really a beginning, an ending, and a state of limbo. I was trying to write my way through a lot of complex emotions, sort through who I was now that I had left the safe embrace of the Centennial State, and also reckon for the first time with being someplace where I wasn’t thought of as being a student first. Or at least where people did not know me as a student first. Where I might even be seen as an expert, a professional. It was a strange realization and feeling.

Because I mentioned the Hero’s Journey, here is the obligatory photo of the book.

Even more so than leaving home for college, leaving Colorado for Virginia was truly my moment of “becoming an adult.” This was my leaving to enter the world. My “call to adventure” in the Hero’s Journey. Except that instead of entering into adventure, I was thrown into a world of anxiety and despair. But if my separation from all that was familiar had one positive effect, it was to serve as the liminal space between Colorado and where I am now.

Looking back, I was hoping Virginia would be something that it was never going to be: permanent. It was only going to be that temporary stopping ground, the space in-between. A place of pause between what was and what is yet to be.

And hopefully that is this job in Memphis, but the future is always cloudy and uncertain. Slippery. And just when you think you have it figured out, life laughs at you. “The best laid plans of mice and men,” and all that jazz.

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So, while I have no idea what my future in Memphis will be in terms of my job and personal life, I do know, or at least have plans for, what the direction this blog will take in the immediate future.

First, I am ending the Ginology series. I am not saying that I’ll never do a gin review again, but after fifteen reviews I think it is time to put it to bed. My enthusiasm for the project started to wane around review 9 or 10 as I figured out that I really did not like to “review” things. Or at the very least, reviewing things that are enjoyable hobbies for me like pens or gins. The pressure and drive to constantly review a new gin, to buy new bottles, to force myself to drink pink gins (I really will not miss that one), and the grind of reviewing…it was killing my enjoyment of something I love.

This is to say nothing of the fact that it was rather hypocritical of me to review things after I spent two posts this year (“FOMO NOMO” and “Just Enjoy,” weeks 2 and 12 respectively, see links above) extolling the merits of trying not to be critical and to find enjoyment where you can. To stop chasing down novelty or attempt to keep up with an endless cycle of consumption. To say nothing of the fact that I flatly said that I would never tell anyone that they had to try/see something.

It is for these same reasons that I will never do pen reviews, why I don’t do formal music reviews, and likewise movies. I would much rather spend my time reflecting upon, analyzing my reactions to, and critiquing such items in a more academic manner than actually “reviewing” them. It is a much better use of not only my time, but more importantly, my talents.

Probably my best gin photo this past year.

So that is the first change you will see here. Last week’s review of Caorunn Scottish Gin will be my last formal gin review. However, I still have an unopened bottle of Suntory Roku Gin…maybe I’ll try out a more rhapsodic format on it once I break the seal?

The second, and admittedly larger, change is that I am dropping the weekly schedule. It has been a great exercise for my writing skills, but the grind has been too much. It helped sustain me through many dark days in Virginia, but now it is causing me anxiety to try and keep up. Not to mention that it is also preventing me from actually getting the hauntology series off the ground. I actually have a solid 5-6 posts for it that just need a little editing, but I have had too much else to do give them a proper polish. And these posts are LONG, like I will probably break them up into smaller posts long.

Which brings me to the last change: from now until the foreseeable future, I am going to devote this blog space to that project. This is not to say that I won’t sneak in the random essay in at times, but I will have to have a really good and important idea that I want to talk about. I plan to start posting what I have of the hauntology series by the end of January, but don’t hold me to it (I do have around eight posts worth of material written and am in the process of editing right now). I will probably quickly post what I have in the next few months as I try to restart my watching and writing routines. However, after that I am going to take my time with this project as I hope to produce around 50,000 total words (probably more) that I could possibly turn into a book down the line.

But we’ll see. I have a lot going on in the new job and my life in Memphis, and somethings have to be given a lower priority in order to maintain balance.